Grüne Teefelder in Shizuoka, Japan, in sanften Hügeln

Is Matcha More Ethical Than Coffee and Tea?

Coffee, Tea, and the Quiet Side of Matcha Why not every cup is grown the same way

For many people, morning coffee is as automatic as brushing their teeth. Few stop to think about the hands that picked the beans, or what those hands were paid. That's exactly where it's worth looking closer — because coffee, tea, and matcha are grown under very different conditions.

The price of coffee

Ripe coffee cherries being hand-picked on a plantation

Coffee is one of the most valuable commodities on earth, yet remarkably little of that value reaches the people who grow it. Research shows farmers often receive only seven to ten percent of the retail price, and in some cases less than three percent. The acclaimed documentary Black Gold follows an Ethiopian cooperative representative through the global coffee trade, revealing just how little bargaining power growers hold against multinational buyers. When world prices fall, it's the farms that absorb the risk — not the traders.

Tea — a quieter reality

Harvested tea leaves being carried to the collection point

Tea rarely gets the same public scrutiny as coffee or cocoa, which makes what happened in 2023 all the more striking. An undercover investigation by BBC Africa Eye and BBC Panorama uncovered systematic sexual abuse on Kenyan tea plantations supplying companies including Unilever, Lipton, and James Finlay & Co. More than seventy women told the BBC that supervisors had demanded sexual favours in exchange for work. The Fairtrade Foundation called the findings "nothing less than a MeToo moment for tea." At the same time, up to 2,000 current and former workers are pursuing a class-action lawsuit through Scottish courts over long-term injuries from harvesting labour.

Closer to home than you'd think

You don't have to look far to find similar patterns. According to research by the NGO Public Eye, reported by Swiss consumer program Kassensturz in 2024, coffee farmers in Mexico and Brazil enrolled in Nestlé's "Nescafé Plan" still struggle to make a living from the prices they're paid — despite the company's sustainability marketing, which features some of these same farmers' faces on its packaging. Nestlé disputes this characterisation, maintaining that it pays "market-standard" prices. In early 2025, Kassensturz also reported that retailer Migros cut its extra Fairtrade premium to coffee farmers in Peru from 50 to 20 centimes per pack of coffee capsules, passing the savings on to customers.

Why matcha grows differently

Tea leaves being hand-picked in a Japanese tea garden

Japanese tea — and matcha with it — follows a fundamentally different logic. Most of Japan's tea is consumed domestically, so there's no large export-oriented plantation system optimised for rock-bottom production costs. Instead, tea is grown mostly by small, family-run farms, many cultivating the same land for generations. This structure isn't the result of a certification scheme; it's the outcome of a very different economic history — and it structurally reduces the risk of the kind of power imbalance seen on plantations in Kenya or Mexico.

Being honest: Japan's tea industry has its own struggles

That doesn't mean everything is perfect. Japan's tea sector is grappling with an ageing workforce and a severe shortage of successors: in Shizuoka alone, the number of tea-farming households fell from roughly 53,700 in 2000 to about 12,300 in 2020. A major reason lies at home: domestic consumption of loose-leaf green tea in Japan steadily declined from around 2011 until quite recently, as the beverage market diversified — bottled tea, coffee, and countless other options filled the shelves. Lower demand meant lower income for growers, making it even harder to pass the farms on to the next generation. This isn't exploitation in the sense described above — it's a question of continuity, of whether there will be enough people left in twenty years to carry the knowledge forward.

This is exactly where we see our own role at ku-u: by helping people outside Japan discover and enjoy this remarkable drink, we hope to play a small part in stabilising the demand — and with it, the future — of Japanese green tea and matcha cultivation.

How ku-u sources its matcha

This is exactly why we care about knowing where our matcha comes from. At ku-u, we source our raw tea (aracha) from local producers and contract farmers, primarily in Shizuoka, complemented by partner farms in other regions of Japan. Rather than buying anonymously on large wholesale markets, we maintain ongoing relationships with farms that follow near-natural, traditional cultivation methods and avoid synthetic pesticides. That way, we know not just what's in the packaging — but who made it possible.

The takeaway

A matcha latte set against a backdrop of green tea fields

That doesn't mean Japan has no challenges at all — which is exactly why we didn't leave them out above. But the structures behind Japanese tea are fundamentally different from those on the large plantations of Kenya or Mexico. At ku-u, we want to be part of the solution wherever we can — by maintaining lasting relationships with our producers and helping Japan's tea and matcha farming stay viable for the long run. And it's precisely this understanding of the differences that makes conscious consumption possible in the first place.

Sources

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